Russia and Ukraine are countries with relatively large untapped agricultural potentials, both in terms of abandoned agricultural land and substantial yield gaps. Here we present a comprehensive assessment of Russian and Ukrainian crop production potentials and we analyze possible impacts of their future utilization, on a regional as well as global scale. To this end, the total amount of available abandoned land and potential yields in Russia and Ukraine are estimated and explicitly implemented in an economic agricultural sector model.

In 2017, the Russian Federation (RF) is estimated to have the largest number of HIV-1 infected citizens of any country in Europe. Cumulative reported diagnoses reached over 1.16 million infections by mid-2017, and actual infections, including those that remain undiagnosed and/or unreported, are doubtless substantially higher. In contrast to the global epidemic pattern, the HIV epidemic in the RF and in most countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia continues to expand significantly.

UNCTAD’s Least Developed Countries Report focuses on transformational energy access for the LDCs, where 62 per cent of people have no access to electricity, compared with 10 per cent across other developing countries.